Harry Targ
Remarks prepared
for participation in a panel discussion of The Letter From a Birmingham Jail
Diversity
Roundtable Summit
April 29, 2023
Lafayette, Indiana
Barbara Ransby wrote in a recent Nation article about the election of Brandon Johnson to serve as the new mayor of Chicago. Johnson, is an African American, a teacher, and a longtime Chicago Teachers Union activist She reported that “Johnson described his victory as the coming together of the civil rights and labor movements, much as Martin Luther King always envisioned.”
Reflecting on the corpus of Dr. King’s writings,
speeches and activism suggests a continuity of his worldview and politics over
a decade before the dramatic Letter From a Birmingham Jail was written, the
seeds of which were planted when Dr. King was a graduate student. Given this
approach, it can be argued, that the Letter From a Birmingham Jail represents a
piece in the puzzle of King’s work, not the initiation or conclusion of it.
Race and History, Economics, Politics,
Culture, and Interpersonal Relations
To clarify we can identify racism as a
multidimensional process, with causes that can be understood historically,
economically, politically, culturally, and in social psychological terms. Using
what may be called a “levels of analysis” approach we can identify the multiple
causes and impacts of racism in the United States.
If we begin with the historical and political economy
“level”, we see that racism emerges with the introduction of the globalization
of capitalism in the fifteenth century. The countries of Northwest Europe,
Portugal, Spain, Great Britain, France, Belgium began to traverse the seas,
establishing colonies where they could by military conquest. The purpose of
such expansion was the acquisition of land, people, and resources. In North and
South America, indigenous people were killed and land and resources were
appropriated for processing and transport back to the home country and then the
world.
Along with technological advances, shipping and guns,
and the occupation of land and resources, the colonial powers needed
inexpensive labor to grow the crops and extract the gold, silver, and rubber. Thus,
with the globalization of capitalism came conquest and the enslavement of
peoples, mostly from Africa. In this sense,
modern racism begins with colonialism and slavery. Without slaves
kidnapped from their homes and brought to the Western Hemisphere, there would
have not been the appropriation and growth of cotton, sugar, coffee, and the
extraction of other commodities such as silver and gold. Without land,
resources, and slave labor there may not have been the industrial revolution.
Along with global economic realities, the slave system
was institutionalized in new constitutions and the creation of military and
police forces to control the slave populations. Scholar of white supremacy
Theodore Allen noted that when indentured servants, Black and whites, rose up
in opposition to the exploitation by large plantation owners in the seventeenth
century, these owners “invented” the white race and the Black race. Race was
a social/political creation designed to
divide the exploited workers who produced the agricultural commodities and
natural resources central to the economic system. Race forever more was used to
split the exploited so that they would not join together to overthrow an
oppressive system. Again, political institutions were established to ensure the
divisions between Blacks and whites. Slaves were defined as three-fifths of a
person in the United States constitution, for example. Furthermore, African
Americans could not vote, Slave rebellions were crushed, and after the US civil
war the system of Jim Crow was established.
In addition, economic and political order was
rationalized over and over again by culture. What was written in history books
about economic and political institutions, about history, and cultural
stereotypes in literature, the stage, radio, television and in virtually every
transmission of ideas served to justify the economic and political systems
based on race. Racist narratives found their way into science, religion, and
educational curricula. And finally, the institutionalization of racism
historically, economically, politically, and culturally was reproduced every
day in interpersonal contacts. Here is where the word “discrimination” fits.
It is important to add that while each of these levels
of racism reinforce each other to create a powerful system of white supremacy,
they all are affected, shaped, and challenged by resistance. All of these forces,
economic, political, cultural, and interpersonal are not omniscient. And Dr King
articulated and organized against these forces his entire life. And his Letter
from a Birmingham Jail argues particularly for an ethical and political
resistance against racism at all levels.
The Letter therefore is located in a community
struggle, a political culture of racism, a regional institution of segregation,
and the need for resistance. Also it was implicitly about the history of
slavery, systems of oppression based on “haves” and “have nots” and the common
struggles of people of color all over the world.
The Importance of Class Struggle for Dr.
King’s Project of Resistance
Dr. King’s thinking about the need for an alliance
between the civil rights and labor movements was expressed many times. As far
back as 1957 at a convention of the United Packinghouse Workers of America
(UPWA) he asserted that “organized labor can be one of the most powerful
instruments in putting an end to discrimination and segregation.” During an
organizing effort of the Hospital Workers Local 1199 in the fall of 1964, King
was a featured speaker at a fundraising rally, He said of the 1199 struggle;
“Your great organizing crusade to win
union and human rights for New Jersey hospital workers is part and parcel of
the struggle we are conducting in the Deep South. I want to congratulate your
union for charting a road for all labor to follow-dedication to the cause of the
underpaid and exploited workers in our nation.”
Upon his return from Norway in 1964 after receiving
the Nobel Peace Prize, King returned to the picket line, this time in support
of Black women workers of the Chemical Workers union at the Scripto Pen Plant
in Atlanta. He said there: “Along with the struggle to desegregate, we must
engage in the struggle for better jobs. The same system that exploits the Negro
exploits the poor white…”
Dr. King recognized in the Letter that the Birmingham
struggle paralleled the struggles of Black and Brown people going on all around
the world to liberate themselves from the historical patterns of
colonialization then just ending. Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed
forever, he wrote. “The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself,
and that is what has happened to the American Negro….Consciously or
unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black
brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South /America
and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great
urgency toward the promised land of racial justice.”
And finally the Dr. King of Birmingham connected the
race and class issues at home with US imperial war in Vietnam in his famous
Riverside Church speech of 1967: “Somehow this madness must cease. We must
stop now. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are
being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of
America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and
corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it
stands aghast at the path we have taken,” He spoke defiantly of the need for a
“radical revolution of values,” an
unremitting commitment to “go out into a sometimes hostile world, declaring
eternal opposition to poverty, racism, and militarism.”
The Relevance of Dr, Martin Luther King
for Today
This Diversity Round Table Summit demonstrated the
continued relevance of Dr. Martin Luther King’s work, protests, writings,
speeches, for today. The material above reminds us that Dr. King was fully
aware of the history, economics, politics, culture, and interpersonal relations
of racism in his day. He was also cognizant of the connections of domestic political life and international
relations. The struggles for social and economic justice, for King, were truly
global.
Therefore we can conclude these brief remarks with the
following conclusions about the relevance of Dr. King, and his writings, such
as The Letter From a Birmingham Jail.
This relevance for today includes the facts that:
--he articulated what is
today a global struggle against violence and war
--he articulated what we
see today as the enormity of economic inequalities within countries as well as
between them
--he emphasized that combatting
racism, white supremacy, and neo-colonialism require alliances between the poor,
the oppressed including women, and workers
--he correctly argued that a just society, local and global, a beloved community is one in which people's needs are met, cooperation supersedes competition, and every member of these communities is an active and equal participant in their development.
Today visionaries in the King tradition include Vijay Prashad, Medea Benjamin and members of Code Pink. And particularly Reverent William Barber and the New Poor People’s Campaign, and the thousands of young people, workers, who are struggling to acquire the right to form unions, and Black Lives Matter activists, are pursuing the King legacy.
Suggested reading:
Michael K. Honey, To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for
Economic Justice,W.W. Norton, 2018.
